The UN put two of its senior officials on special leave on Tuesday following a scathing report on safety precautions before the deadly August bombing of UN offices in Baghdad.
The two were Tun Myat of Myanmar, the global UN security coordinator, and Ramiro Lopes da Silva of Portugal.
Lopes da Silva has been the acting head of mission in Iraq since the Aug. 19 attack on the organization's headquarters that killed 22 staff and visitors, including the head of the operation, Sergio Vieira de Mello.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric de la Riviere said both men had asked to be relieved of their duties while a new four-member team appointed by Secretary-General Kofi Annan determines "accountability at all managerial levels at headquarters and in the field" for the security failures.
But other UN officials said they had no choice.
"Accordingly, the secretary-general has decided that they will take special leave until mid-January, while remaining available to the team to provide information," Dujarric said.
During this period, American Catherine Bertini, the UN undersecretary-general for management, takes charge of security.
Annan, in a letter to UN staff on Friday, pledged to address "systematic failures" in the world body's security system to ensure that they were not repeated.
He was responding to a chilling report on Oct. 22 from an independent panel, headed by Martti Ahtisaari, a former Finnish president, who probed the August suicide bombing of the UN offices in Baghdad.
The panel's report said the UN security system was so "dysfunctional" and "sloppy" that it probably cost lives. Deficiencies included a lack of knowing how many foreign staff were in Iraq, a delay in installing shatterproof glass and a rejection of US military protection without making alternate arrangements.
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